Winning Ugly is the first serious book to assess NATO's first war--an 11-week bombing campaign waged against Serbia to force its troops out of Kosovo in the spring of 1999. The authors, Ivo H. Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon, both of the Brookings Institution, are careful scholars, and they are generally supportive of what the United States and its allies did: "The outcome achieved in Kosovo, while hardly without its problems, represented a major improvement over what had prevailed in the region up to that point and certainly over what would have happened had NATO chosen not to intervene." Yet they are also critical of how this particular approach was formulated by policymakers, and they readily believe better results might have been achieved. In other words, the air war was a success, but a relative one; the good guys won, but--as the title implies--they won ugly.

Daalder and O'Hanlon sometimes equivocate--"Could war in Kosovo have been prevented? The answer, we believe, is maybe"--yet Winning Ugly is an excellent summary of what happened and why it happened the way it did. On the question of whether Operation Allied Force actually prevailed, something skeptics have questioned, they write: "The vast majority of Kosovars are far better off today.... [Slobodan] Milosevic unquestionably lost the war, and his defeat was overwhelming." This is a foreign-policy wonk's book, a sober analysis that tries to draw clear lessons from experience. It's not only the first book worth examining for readers interested in what happened in Kosovo; it may be the best available for some time. --John J. Miller


Book Description
After eleven weeks of bombing in the spring of 1999, the United States and NATO won the war in Kosovo. Serbian troops were forced to withdraw, an international military and political presence took charge, and nearly a million refugees returned. In a new book to be published on the first anniversary of the war's end, Ivo H. Daalder and Michael O'Hanlon explore the causes, conduct, and consequences of the Kosovo conflict. Drawing on interviews with many key U.S., NATO, and allied participants, the authors analyze the diplomatic mistakes preceding the war and question NATO's strategy for averting a humanitarian crisis once the war began. They are particularly critical of the decision to use limited force for symbolic, psychological, and political purposes-a strategy that allowed the Serbs to radically alter Kosovo's ethnic balance through mass expulsion and genocide-before finally implementing a more forceful and successful strategy to end the war on NATO's terms. The authors conclude their survey of the Kosovo crisis by examining how threats and the use of force might be manipulated in the future to achieve limited political objectives and how the conduct of such coercive diplomacy can best be managed within an alliance context.


About the Author
Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, was director of European Affairs on the National Security Council staff from 1995 to 1996. He is the author of Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy (Brookings, 2000). Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, is the author of Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Brookings, 2000).

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews

Both from the Institute, Daalder was director or European affairs on the National Security Council, and so responsible for coordinating US policy for Bosnia in 1995 and 1996, while O'Hanlon specializes in US defense strategy and has also worked for the US government. They consider whether the Kosovo bombing was the product of failed western diplomacy, and whether NATO adopted a sound strategy to achieve its aim of stabilizing Kosovo. They conclude that the western parties did the best they could, but warn that in the future they should try to avoid such a situation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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